All articles on Ranting

I want to share my very recent experience with agentic coding. Primarily because I was (finally) genuinely impressed by the productivity gains it unlocked. But also because I'm fed up with posts on X claiming that you can now build absolutely anything in no time, with almost no prior domain knowledge or programming experience. While that might be true to some extent for prototyping or throwaway apps you can one-shot, this is not what I'm seeing in real production systems.

The amount of engineering effort, domain knowledge in general, and familiarity with a project's codebase in particular now likely matter more than ever. Agents generate code extremely fast, and that can be both a blessing and a curse for long-term maintainability and extensibility.

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After a long break from posting on this blog, I'm happy to share the continuation of the iximiuz Labs story. This time, I'm going to cover the recent overhaul of the playground engine, which I like to call Playgrounds 2.0:

• Quick recap: iximiuz Labs playgrounds - what are they, really?
• How VMs are constructed by mixing the rootfs and the kernel
• How to run custom playgrounds with simple YAML manifests
• How to bake and use custom VM rootfs images
• How to create multi-network playgrounds
• Why you should start creating Linux playgrounds today

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The recent post by DHH regarding their decision to drop TypeScript support in Turbo 8 has suddenly made everyone eager to express their opinion on the TypeScript vs. JavaScript dilemma, and I'm no exception. Hell, I don't even know what Turbo 8 is, but I feel like I have something to share too. Just a few weeks ago I migrated one of my two biggest projects to TypeScript while keeping the other one using JavaScript, and this is exactly how I like it to be, for now.

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Today, I came across a true gem: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design. Originally written for the aerospace engineering domain. I find many parts of it relevant for software engineers as well. Below, I share my thoughts on the Laws that resonate most with my experience as a software designer and tech blogger.

As it often happens, I discovered it through Matt Rickard's newsletter.

What DALL-E thinks the image for this blog post should look like.

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This is a long overdue post on iximiuz Labs' internal kitchen. It'll cover why I decided to build my own learning-by-doing platform for DevOps, SRE, and Platform engineers, how I designed it, what technology stack chose, and how various components of the platform were implemented. It'll also touch on some of the trade-offs that I had to make along the way and highlight the most interesting parts of the platform's architecture. In the end, I'll, of course, share my thoughts on what's next on the roadmap. Sounds interesting? Then brace for a long read!

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